Healing

This is a process: The ending of your marriage and coming to terms with the relationship being over is just one part of multiple stages in the grieving and adapting process.  Be careful not to rush into dating and especially relationships too soon after a marriage or long-term relationship ends.   You should give yourself a minimum of 6 to 12 months before considering entering the dating field again.

Learn to be Alone: Before you can learn to be with someone new, you should first learn to be alone and comfortable with that. This helps make sure you enter the dating scene a complete and whole person again and also helps in making sure you are dating for the right reasons.  The person you ultimately end up with should be a great compliment to your life but not a necessity.  Coming back to personal wholeness ensures you are not choosing people to try and fill gaps in your own life.

Move on from Victim-hood:  Especially in relationships that ended in turbulent situations, the first phases of moving on will have an element of victim-hood where you feel the hurt and anger the situation has brought on you.  While this is a normal step in the process, too many people get hooked into this phase and have a hard time leaving.  Instead, you should seek to move into growth and gratitude.  There is no set time for how long you should be stuck in the victim period, but understand that the quicker you can move out of it and into growth the better.  A good exercise may be to practice gratitude for the lessons of the relationship, both good and bad, and to understand you have been given a great opportunity to redefine yourself.

To help with this process, we recommend the book From We to Me: Embracing Life Again After the Death or Divorce of a Spouse by Susan J. Zonnebelt-Smeenge R.N. Ed.D andRobert C. De Vries.

Take Responsibility for the Previous Relationship: Understand that there is a difference between taking fault and taking responsibility for the problems in your previous relationship.  Taking responsibility is about learning what patterns, behaviors, or decisions you have made that helped contribute to the events that occurred.  Sometimes it can mean needing to do deep work to understand how you are within relationships and the potentially toxic attributes you tend to get drawn to in a partner and other times it can mean learning to simply set stronger boundaries.  You also want to take responsibility for healing yourself though to this next phase of your life and to not get too stuck in the victim or anger stage.

To help with this process, we recommend the book Conscious Uncoupling: 5 Steps to Living Happily Even After by Katherine Woodward Thomas.

Begin Doing Things you love: Getting out there and joining activities or groups focused around things that you truly enjoy is important in helping to rebuild a new healthy and healed you. It also is going to set up circumstances that will help maximize the chances of you finding a partner that you really mesh well with once you are ready to start dating again.  Use this time to start building up new and powerful friendships.  You can also start working towards the goals and aspirations you had but may not have pursued while in a relationship.  As Dr Robert Glover talks about in his book No More Mr. Nice Guy, you begin building your great cake of a life so that you can find the perfect frosting.

Build your Tribe: While you may already have great and supportive friends in your life, this is a great time to start building new friendships based on the new life you are looking to create for yourself.  These should be friends who fall in line with the vision you have for a future you.  Seek friends who will push you to grow towards that higher vision while cutting out those who had been toxic.  Remember to seek friends who will lift you up rather than hold you down, intentionally or not.